Hi, I'm Doug Motel, and this is Art Spirit Sunday, which is kind of loosey-goosey. It is just talking a little bit about spirituality and how it overlaps with creativity, sometimes.
Today, I wanted to talk to you about what I call the Phony Inner Psychic.
You may have heard that there are a lot of psychological terms that have to do with the different voices within the inner child, the inner critic, etc. In fact, I am a great believer that we are essentially a collage of characters. You might find yourself channeling a completely different person when you're getting pulled over by the police for speeding, than the person that you find yourself being if you're saying hi to someone at a party that you have a crush on. Different characters live within us and they come through.
The Phony Psychic is the voice that's always predicting the future. And it's a bit of a doomsday-er too. When you stick your neck out, when you take a risk or decide to do something bold, or out of your comfort zone, you may, (if you're like me), a voice predicting all the things that could go wrong.
In fact, that voice spends much more time looking at its crystal ball and saying, "Oh, this is going to go very wrong for you, look at all the possible threats." For many of us, it is just a habit to think of all the things that can go wrong.
I've spent so much time fighting that voice.
But if you are expecting me to tell you how to get rid of that voice, I'm really going to disappoint you because I've come to believe that that voice actually has an important role.
I think in a way, that phony psychic voice is giving us a chance to work out the catastrophic scenarios in our minds and test them out so we can feel strong enough to move on. If we can tell ourselves that these things are going to go wrong and yet we envision ourselves surviving it anyway or getting to the other side of those problems, it's like we get a chance to rehearse it in our mind.
I'm not a psychologist. I have no proof about this, other than my own experience. But I have found that when I stop fighting the voices, (any voice, really) and just step back and say, "Oh, that's the inner critic”, or “that's the phony psychic predicting everything's going to go bad for me..." when you can take a step backward and just look at that voice, and resist that panicky feeling of, "Oh, no, I don't want to have those thoughts, let me get an affirmation going so I can counter that!" there is very limited success.
If you're like me, and your imagination can be very adept at predicting a bunch of problems that are going to come up whenever you try something new or take a risk. I can tell you that I've experimented with all sorts of approaches, and the approach that seems to work best for me is to just see it as a game. Like, "Oh, that's the game I'm playing with the phony psychic. And the phony psychic is having their say because, on some level, they are trying to help” the context changes.
When my daughter was a toddler, I found myself sometimes laying in bed and imagining all kinds of horrible things that may happen to her in her crib. It was so crazy. But then I started talking to some other dads, and they were doing the same thing! They were imagining the worst-case scenarios. I began to see that exercise of the mind as an attempt to be helpful, to give me a chance to imagine the worst scenario and work my way through it.
If you're not like me, and you don't have a habit of imagining catastrophes as you try new things or branch out, then lucky you! And I say that with all sincerity, and can I be you for a day? But if you're not in that unique position, I encourage you to consider just having it be okay. Just take a breath and resist the urge to fix it. Resist the urge to silence that voice or to cure yourself of that voice of the phony psychic who's going to predict bad things. There's something about acceptance that can be very powerful.
Anyway, those are my thoughts that I wanted to share with you today. Thank you so much. Please click all of the Likes or the Subscribees, and come back to Art Spirit Sunday. Thanks.